36 Years Of War And 200,000 Deaths Ravaged This Country, And Now Its New President Is Denying It All

For 36 years, Guatemala was embroiled in a deadly civil war that
took the lives of over
200,000 people.

But not if you ask its newly elected president — and former top
military official — Otto Perez Molina.

Molina is days away from assuming control of Guatemala, which has
become one of the world's most
homicidal nations, thanks to a spilling over of drug
trafficking and violence from neighboring Mexico. Molina ran on a
platform of an "iron first" against soaring crime, according to
the Associated Press (via
NPR).

Part of that campaign promise includes obtaining military aid
from the U.S., which cut all funding after an American civilian
was murdered by the Guatemalan army in 1990.

Beginning in the 1950s and 60s, the government of Guatemala was
infused with funding, training and weaponry from the CIA and the
Green Berets to combat the perceived "communist threat" in the
mountainous areas of Guatemala.

The counterinsurgency carried out by the military, mainly against
the rural, indigenous population, led to a myriad of human rights
violations, from torture and kidnapping to outright murder.

Yet it took the murder of
Michael Devine, an American businessman, for the U.S. to turn
its back on the military it had helped create. The country's
civil war officially ended in 1996.

Now, Molina wants to welcome back American involvement in the
country's affairs, in order to procure enough firepower to beat
back the rising tide of Mexican drug running that has helped
raise Guatemala's homicide rate to
41 people per 100,000 residents.

In order to regain military aid, the government must prove to the
the U.S. State Department that the military is "respecting
internationally recognized human rights."

During the war, Molina was a top official at a military base in
the
Nebaj region, which at one point was removed from the
country's map altogether in order to pursue a "scorched earth"
policy to fight the insurgency.